Awareness in logic and cognitive neuroscience

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscience has provided important insights into the notions like implicit versus explicit information processing in perception, object identification, memory, and general information retrieval. Even more topically, neuroscience has brought the notion of awareness in the forefront. of human knowledge. Yet the logical reflections of awareness and the implicit/explicit distinction have remained by and large uncharted. To improve on this situation, we introduce cognitively motivated logical operators related to actual experimental aspects of awareness into the modal language. Their semantics is given by grounding logical senses of awareness on a dynamic structure of possible worlds. We show that many neuroscientific findings on neural dysfunctions can be made to contribute to the logical level of investigation. In particular, the logics of awareness are enriched by experimental findings on brain and cognitive disorders such as blindsight, unilateral neglect, prosopagnosia, and implicit memory.